To-Do List: Etan Patz Case Closed?; The Fight in Honduras

To know: The N.Y.P.D. says a man has claimed that he had a role in the 1979 disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz … New unemployment claims fell only slightly last week, dropping by two thousand to three hundred and seventy thousand … For a second day, Egyptians went to the polls to vote for their next President … The New Orleans Times-Picayune is reportedly about to undergo a large round of layoffs, and it may cease daily publication … Los Angeles’s City Council banned the use of plastic bags in supermarkets.

To read: The New York Times’ Damien Cave on the consequences of drug trafficking—and the fight against it—in Honduras:

The orange glow of a burning house brightened the morning sky. Then another and another. Four homes were set ablaze in this muddy river town just hours after the Honduran and American authorities swooped down in helicopters as part of a major drug raid that recovered a half ton of cocaine.

“At first we had no idea what was happening,” Sinicio Ordoñez, a local leader, said of the fires.

It soon became clear: the burned homes were not part of the raid itself, but retaliatory attacks by residents against their neighbors who were working with drug traffickers. As angry as residents were with the Honduran and American governments for a joint commando operation on May 11 that they insist took the lives of four innocent people, they had rage to spare for those who have helped make this poor town on the Mosquito Coast a way station for cocaine moving from the Andes to the United States….

Honduras has received an enormous influx of American military and antidrug support over the past few years, reflecting cocaine traffickers’ shift toward Central America. But with all that muscle, people here in Ahuas and in other towns nearby now say they feel threatened from outside and from within.

They are furious with traffickers for making their country a cocaine transfer point; disappointed in their neighbors who rely on the drug trade for work; and frustrated, as well, with the Honduran and American authorities who, in their view, often invade their communities with more concern for seizing cocaine than protecting people.

For GQ, Amy Wallace writes about the singer D’Angelo’s disappearance from the scene, and his comeback:

Shame, guilt, repentance—D’Angelo knows them well. To say that he was raised religious doesn’t begin to capture it. He’s the son and the grandson of Pentecostal preachers. To D’Angelo, good and evil are not abstract concepts but tangible forces he reckons with every day. In his life and in his music, he has always felt the tension between the sacred and the profane, the darkness and the light.

“You know what they say about Lucifer, right, before he was cast out?” D’Angelo asks me now. “Every angel has their specialty, and his was praise. They say that he could play every instrument with one finger and that the music was just awesome. And he was exceptionally beautiful, Lucifer—as an angel, he was.”

But after he descended into hell, Lucifer was fearsome, he tells me. “There’s forces that are going on that I don’t think a lot of motherfuckers that make music today are aware of,” he says. “It’s deep. I’ve felt it. I’ve felt other forces pulling at me.” He stubs out his cigarette and leans toward me, taking my hand. “This is a very powerful medium that we are involved in,” he says gravely. “I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher. It was a ministry in itself. We could stir the pot, you know? The stage is our pulpit, and you can use all of that energy and that music and the lights and the colors and the sound. But you know, you’ve got to be careful.”

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